Free Earth vs. Everybody by John Swartzwelder Page B

inhabitants didn’t mind me hanging around with them,
since most of the time they couldn’t even see me. But getting work was tough.
The first place I went to, to apply for a job, they just smacked me with a
flyswatter. The next place they sprayed me with something. After a few
experiences like that—with people trying to step on you and yelling “There he
goes!”—you start to lose your self-confidence. I kept at it though. You’ve got
to keep trying, if you want to succeed on Giganta-Planet.
    I never did find
a full time job there, but I managed to pick up a few bucks doing odd jobs. I
was a ball for awhile in some game they liked to play, which was okay except
for the times when they knocked the cover off me. And I got a part time job as
a book mark. At one point I tried living in a rich man’s bloodstream, but after
a couple of weeks a doctor tipped him off that I was in there, and that that’s
where all the loud music was coming from, and he told me to clear out. I was
disgusted. The whole thing was turning into a farce. I seemed to be getting
smaller or larger depending on what the joke was. That’s no way to live. I
finally decided to clear out. That planet was all wrong for me.
    Unfortunately, so
were all the other planets I visited. Either I was much too big and kept
sliding off, or I was far too small and had to dodge more flyswatters.
Sometimes I was just the right size, but I made so much noise running around
yelling that I’d found the perfect planet they had to ask me to leave.
Sometimes the atmosphere was poisonous. Or the atmosphere was okay but I was
poisonous. It was always something.
    One planet I
landed on seemed promising, at first—everybody was about my size, and looked
more or less like me—but not only could I not make a living there, nobody was
making a living. Their civilization apparently had never made any progress at
all. No discoveries, no inventions, they hadn’t even built anything yet. When I
showed up they were just standing there, staring. They said they had been
standing there like that for thousands of years. I told them they couldn’t live
like that. They said they’d been doing all right until I came along. I said
maybe so, but they still couldn’t live like that. They shrugged and said:
“You’re the boss”. I taught them about fire and agriculture. But I couldn’t
remember anything else to teach them. When I left they were still just standing
there, but now they were smoking cigarettes.
    Another planet
that looked all right to me at first—in fact it looked perfect in every way—was
a kind of utopian planet, run by a computer, where everybody made the same
amount of money and everybody lived exactly the same life. It was completely
fair in every way. The only problem was, nobody talked about anything. And the
only jobs on the planet were computer repairman. I don’t know anything about
computers. They found that out soon enough. It took them a month after I had
left to get all the maple syrup cleaned out of the computer and get their
utopia up and running again. But at least I had given them something to talk
about.
    On another planet
it was me that was running things, if you can believe it. Moments after I
landed—I was answering an ad that said: “Wanted: A man with a brain”—the
inhabitants stole my brain and used it to control everything on their planet:
making the air circulate, regulating the temperature, and so on. The whole
place died out in a week. I’m not sure how my brain got out of there and got
back into my head, but I’m sure glad it did. We’ve got to get out of here, my
brain said. This place is dead. Right behind you pal, I said. And we got out of
there fast.
    Finally I
realized I needed help. I couldn’t do this on my own. I went to a government
resettlement agency that specialized in finding the right planets for people
who were too stupid to find things for themselves. The lady there, a Mrs. Jacobson,
interviewed me. I told her